Merit and Inheritance
Chapter Forty-seven
Some New Possibilities
Harry became very protective of Daphne as a result of the Selwyn abduction and their adventure in the Alps. Both were pleased with the outcome. They both knew so much could have gone disastrously wrong. Harry thought Daphne's escape from her restraints and use of Iolanthe's portal showed extraordinary mastery of magical technique. He also acknowledged her cool-headedness in stopping him from mounting an impetuous, cavalry-like dash through the portal. The addition of Narcissa Malfoy was by itself a cautionary note for the Berg-Mendini's to contemplate.
On the other hand, the surprise attack, when Daphne was in a vulnerable position, showed how a semi-competent wizard with just a little help from Lady Luck might do serious damage to the Potters. Harry tried insisting he accompany Daphne to and from St. Mungo's. Daphne didn't argue but she did glare at Harry until he abandoned his position. Harry began waking up early on the mornings when Daphne would be returning home from an overnight shift. It wasn't anything he planned to do. He simply found himself wide awake around five in the morning, giving him plenty of time for a shower and light breakfast before he apparated to St. Mungo's.
The emergency section had plenty of seating in the waiting area. Harry would show up about fifteen minutes before seven, go directly to the cafeteria and return to emergency with two cups of coffee. The reception desk would inform Daphne he was there and he'd occupy himself with coffee and the Daily Prophet until she finished her shift.
"You don't have to do this," Daphne said, the first time or two. "I swear I've learned my lesson."
"I know," Harry said each time. "Coffee's good this morning. I just woke up early and thought I'd get you a cup. Might as well go home together. As long as I happened to be here."
Harry would then stay around the house until Daphne went to sleep. If he was going to his office, he would set every ward before departing. He told himself it was normal, everyday caution. It was, in the sense of remembering, every day, Dorea's comment about the threat from X.
Weeks went by with no sign of X. Harry's businesses continued to do well. Daphne had the Greengrass enterprises stabilized and began paying off the note that Harry held on the manor. Harry offered to forgive the loan or sell the note to Daphne for one peppercorn, as she wished. His view was that she would be inheriting the manor at such time as Cyrus and Cordelia had no further use for it, so why clutter up their lives with the paperwork?
Daphne demurred, insisting the repayment was a useful reminder to Cyrus that inattention to the fundamentals, i.e., not borrowing unless one intended to repay, had nearly bankrupted the Greengrass family. Daphne still sat down regularly, usually once a month, with Cyrus and Cordelia. She brought a file folder with three summaries of the status of the family sources of income and Cyrus' loans. She included figures for beginning balance and ending balance for the period shown. Daphne did nothing to call attention to the status of the mortgage on Greengrass Manor, the one that Harry held. It was there among the other outstanding loans. Cyrus could read for himself.
Harry had made his offer while strolling in the garden.
"He doesn't appear to bear any grudges," said Daphne. The daisies were having a great summer, so Daphne stopped to collect a bunch for the house. "No snark about you and your ethics, or lack thereof. He seems content to sit there and watch me work it all out for him."
"What are you going to do when you've put everything right?" asked Harry. "Will you let him have his head?"
"Oh, I don't know," Daphne answered. She took a long pause, choosing her words with care.
"I do think about that, more than I'd like. It isn't keeping me awake at night. It's just there, decision time, right? Getting a little bit closer every month."
"Brilliant," said Harry. "Forgive me, but Cyrus couldn't say that."
Daphne smiled, lopsided, a bit of rue showing.
"No, he couldn't," she said. "So very sad to say."
They walked slowly on the graveled paths that wound among the beds. Harry took Daphne's hand.
"You're doing a great job, you should know," he said. "Can I tell you something in confidence? I really wouldn't want this to get out. Hurt feelings…"
"If you want, sure," said Daphne.
"Neville, who has a good business mind, didn't think we would get this far."
"Oh, thanks, Cuz," said Daphne, adding a little snort for punctuation.
"He was probably right, at the time," Harry mused. "An outsider, like me, wouldn't have commanded the attention. You and Cordelia did it, I think."
They walked on, listening to the stone crunching underfoot.
"Thank-you," Daphne said. Harry came out of his reverie.
"For?" asked Harry.
"Being there, for me," said Daphne. "For all of us. You did it all, figured it all out. I'm working your plan, with Mother's help. When I think of Astoria…OH! I still get so angry at him sometimes. How can a father do that? Promise me you'll never…"
Harry paused. The way she said it, like it was here, now. Daphne took another step forward, then another. Harry looked at the back of Daphne's head. She took another step, head down, studying her own feet moving along the path. Harry trotted ahead, taking Daphne's hand when he caught up.
"Daphne?"
Daphne stopped and turned to face Harry, although she looked over the top of his head at first.
"This isn't how I imagined…I haven't been taking anything, and we've been…active, I suppose…I'm a little behind schedule…"
"And you're?" asked Harry.
"Late," said Daphne. "All I can say right now. Still well within normal limits, I could start tomorrow. The thing is, there is a certain way I feel, a day or two before, and I haven't felt that way, so, each day that goes by-If you get my drift."
"Oh, I do," Harry said as a very satisfied smile crept slowly up his face.
"You're not upset? We talked about family, kind of in the abstract," said Daphne. "We didn't get as far as agreeing we'd try, specifically. Merlin, I've messed this up completely, haven't I? I didn't want to have it come out this way. I've reverted to hormone-addled seventh-year."
Harry started to laugh, a giddy chortle bubbling up from deep inside. His head swam, a thousand thoughts a second tried to become words.
"No," he managed. "NO—I'm not upset. Upset? Ha-ha-ha! How could I? Oh, Daphne, here."
He wrapped his arms around her waist.
"Oh, a family, with you! That's, that's unimaginable. I hope you are. Not late, I mean, uh, the other," he said.
"You can say it, Harry," Daphne teased. "Try. Preg…"
"…gers," said Harry.
"NO, you slippery wizard, say the word," demanded Daphne.
Harry took a deep breath.
"My wife, Daphne Potter, might be pregnant," Harry said. His leaned, putting his lips next to her ear. "I hope so. I love her so much, I don't have words to describe how much."
They leaned back, gripping one another's forearms.
"Thank-you, Harry," said Daphne. She didn't get sniffles but it looked to Harry like she was blinking quite a bit. "I love you, too. And I really want to make a family with you."
They walked on. Bees still buzzed around blossoms. Flowers past their peak bloom had begun to dry in the sun, putting out the scent that Harry always associated with the bunches of dried herbs and flowering plants, hung up by their stems in Professor Sprout's greenhouses. Their feet kept crunching the gravel, slowly.
"Going to be full dark," said Harry.
"Uh-huh, work tomorrow," answered Daphne.
"Hate to go in," Harry allowed.
"Have to sometime," said Daphne.
"Sometime," said Harry. "I guess. Tomorrow's just the office, right?"
"Right," said Daphne. "You get to sleep late."
Harry spent the rest of their waking hours attempting to toady to his wife, no easy task in a home comprising two family members served by an efficient house elf. Daphne didn't feel a need to be toadied to but Harry was so sweet about it and was clearly having a great deal of fun, so she let him continue until time for bed.
"Harry," Daphne said as the bedroom lamps flickered their last. "I could just be a little bit overdue. Late. I let you be a concerned husband tonight but could you save it? Expectant witches really need the support and attention and all of your love at the end, the last month or six weeks. I don't know how many witches I've had tell me that. Lots."
"Oh, of course," said Harry. "Did I overdo?"
"Maybe, a bit."
Harry sighed.
"It's nice to think about," he said.
"Which I didn't mean to do," said Daphne. "That's not right, getting you all a-flutter before I know anything."
Harry slid his arm under and pulled Daphne close, even though he knew the arm would go to sleep and then he would be trying to extract it without waking his wife.
That night Harry dreamt of his front lawn. He stood at the top of the steps, the big door closed behind him. At first he was a bit distant, looking back at himself. His point of view changed and he looked out through the eyes of the Harry standing on the steps. The Potter lambs were playing on the lawn, chasing one another, jumping about and kicking up their hind legs. The woman he met when he and Daphne shared the dream on their wedding night stood among them, looking back at the house, and Harry. As she looked at him, she shook her head.
"Not this time," Harry heard.
"Blast," said Daphne. She threw back the sheet and the duvet, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. Harry was fully awake and watched his wife slip out to their bathroom. She took care to close the door so quietly that all Harry heard was the click of the latch.
Harry's eyes caught just enough light to betray his wakefulness when Daphne came back to bed. Once she slid in beside him Harry reached over and pulled her to his side. She settled in and gave him an inarticulate murmur of approval.
"Time?" she asked.
Harry kissed Daphne's forehead before he answered.
"Four, more or less," he said, then, "Not this time."
Daphne sighed.
"Not this time, I'm so sorry," she confirmed.
"For what?" asked Harry.
"False alarm," Daphne said. "Getting you all worked up over nothing…"
"Hush," Harry ordered. "It was wonderful, for a few hours. It's just Nature, doing its thing, is all. Do I wish your suspicions had been confirmed? Yes, of course. You're the subject matter expert, but my understanding is we have been doing everything according to standard practice. So, we keep practicing."
"I like practicing," Daphne whispered. "You run the best practices ever."
They turned their attention to getting back to sleep so everyone would be ready for work. Harry was very solicitous of his wife, from when they got up through breakfast, until she left for her office. He tried not to overdo on the little toadying gestures, calling Kreacher for a refill of Daphne's teacup rather than doing it himself. He must have stayed in his own lane, he decided, catching Daphne's indulgent smile only two or three times before she dispensed her good-bye kiss and stepped into the flames of the fireplace in the salon.
"Lord Potter?"
Dorea waited until Daphne was away before she reached out to Harry.
"Grandmother Dorea, how are you this morning?"
"How are you, Harry?" asked Dorea.
"Great-grandmother…" Harry began, then stopped. He considered his next words, his answer to Dorea's question.
"You are aware we had a little excitement? For a few hours? How is that, exactly?"
"There was a feeling, about the house, one could say," Dorea admitted.
"I'm fine, Grandmother," Harry said, smiling up at the portrait. "I appreciate your asking me. We were delighted, but it was a false alarm, that's all. I've resolved to think of it as an invitation, from the Powers That Be, to consider future possibilities, and be ready."
"Good attitude," said Dorea.
Harry didn't have a lot of work waiting at the office so he picked up his Potter Orb in its velvet bag along with a volume of the Potter grimoire, saluted Dorea Black Potter in her gilded frame and stepped into the fireplace.
Pansy had brought the little orb back and left it in the middle of Harry's desk. He sat for several minutes, looking at the two, trying to decide if one had a clearer fundamental character than its cousin, or if he felt more empathetic with this one or that.
Finally deciding if there were a difference, he'd be most unlikely to discern it in his present state of expertise, Harry opened his volume of family magical lore and began to scan pages. He was looking for references, however tangential, to soothsaying, prognostication, clairvoyance and divination.
Harry had not been serious about divination at Hogwarts. He was very much in Hermione Granger's camp, skeptical, more than a little suspicious of both divination and its most vocal fans. One of those fans, of course, was Lavender Brown, with whom Hermione had unrelated issues that Harry didn't share.
He wasn't sure exactly what he was looking for, or why. All Harry knew was that he had been taken by surprise by a number of events during the year just past. If there were real provisions that could give a wizard an early warning, Harry asked himself, why not use them?
The grimoire contained secrets. All of it was available to Harry. As a Potter he had free rein in the Potter grimoire. Although the nuggets were not secrets for him, the grimoire took its time giving them up. A few of Harry's relatives were oriented toward organization. He had run across three incomplete indexes purely by accident. The reason was apparent, after a little thought. The indexers started their projects but they had to die while the Potters kept going, adding more to the grimoires as they went along. Judging from his reading, Harry thought it unlikely anyone had done an update at any time during the last two hundred years. Harry plodded on, page by page, jotting references down on a piece of note parchment so he could find his way back in the original manuscript.
Harry Potter sat at his Potter and Associates desk. He began his viewing with the orb from the Potter vault. He tried holding a thought while staring into the crystal. Now and then some cloudiness appeared, stayed for a minute or two, then dissipated. At least, that is what Harry thought was happening. He settled into a method. Once an area of exploration emerged, Harry formulated a question that he held in his mind, then he waited for the sphere to…what? He didn't know. Did he even want an answer, as such? It wasn't certain the crystal ball was capable of giving an actual answer. Different practitioners described their experiences in different ways.
Even so, it was a method. Harry resolved to stick with it until he learned enough to modify something.
Still associating the Selwyn-Mendini-Berg collaboration with his great-grandmother's Threat X, Harry tried to focus his mind's eye on those individuals he had seen in person while holding the thought that he was asking for the orb's threat assessment. As Harry stared, his mind tried to drift. He brought it back to the business they'd undertaken. He focused on the orb before letting his eyes go out of focus. He tried looking through the crystal, only to see his desk blotter magnified. He pulled back a bit and tried to look into the orb without focusing on what was on the other side. A face faded in. It could have been Laurent Selwyn.
The face declined to stay in focus. The orb worked its way through Marcella Berg, Ricardo Mendini, Amalia Berg.
Daphne put Laurent Selwyn into a stone wall. Did they leave him there to die?
Harry's office replaced the orb. He looked around. The clock said it was ninety minutes later than it had been the last time he looked.
Harry took a deep breath, then another. He stood, pushed his chair back and stepped out from behind the desk, headed to his bathroom. Harry stood at the sink and looked at his own face in the mirror, looking right back at him.
A thought occurred.
"That was interesting."
Harry felt like he needed to go for a run. He'd have preferred to go back to Potter Manor and get out the Firebolt and solo for an hour or two. The shorts, sweatshirt and trainers in the office bathroom cupboard were tempting, but Harry hadn't spoken to Pansy yet so he settled on an apparition to the tea room's neighborhood and a three-block stroll through the ever-fascinating London streetscape.
The door spell sounded, a sweet tinkling-bell facsimile that didn't involve a bell at all.
"Harry! Come for a pot of green?" Pansy asked when he walked in.
"Yes," said Harry. "The green sounds better. Do you have those little pearls that unfold in the hot water?"
"Of course," said Pansy. "We're running a tea room."